Posts tagged with: government intrusion

More than 100 religious organizations are urging members of Congress to reject pending legislation that would prohibit them from considering religion when hiring.

A letter – endorsed by such groups as World Vision, Association of Gospel Rescue Missions, U.S. conference of Catholic Bishops, and Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America – was delivered Wednesday.

“The law has long protected the religious freedom of both the people who receive government-funded services, and the groups that provide the services – long before President Obama, and long before President Bush,” said Anthony R. Picarello Jr., general counsel of USCCB, in a statement. “Stripping away the religious hiring rights of religious service providers violates the principle of religious freedom, and represents bad practice in the delivery of social services.”

The groups are protesting a provision in HR 5466 – a bill introduce in the House in May that would reauthorize federal substance abuse treatment funding that is administered by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

Sponsored by Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-RI), the bill includes language banning faith-based groups from receiving federal funds if they consider religion in their hiring process.

On the weekend I read the text of the talk Barack Obama gave on Tuesday to a public school in Virginia and through the medium of technology to students throughout the nation who wished to see and hear him on their school televisions. I think of Ray Bradbury’s story “Fahrenheit 451″ and plasma walls at times like these.

I’ve written over the years as have others on the errors of having a Federal Department of Education and the Obama speech and it’s reach into the classrooms of America’s kids is an example of why so many have tried to rid our country of that intrusive and unnecessary bureaucracy. Despite Rush Limbaugh’s characterization of the speech as essentially “conservative” — I beg to differ.

The speech was undeniably an intrusion by the federal government directly into the neighborhood school with its end run around the district and state school boards — the remaining link parents have with the public school. School board members are traditionally elected. This, no matter its content, rules the talk anti-conservative.

Many will cleaverly dissect the speech because it is full of so much to ridicule as it pertains to Obama’s actual life and it’s containment of obvious errors, for example pointing out to children that they may be the next inventor of an iphone as an enticement to stay in school when it is well known that both Apple’s and Microsoft’s creators were college dropouts; but that’s not the point of this essay. My point is to illustrate how much the material world and the “me” culture has become a part of the American culture; and to possibly redirect some to consider an alternative.

“The story of America,” Obama says toward his conclusion, “isn’t about people who quit when things got tough. It’s about people who kept going, who tried harder, who loved their country too much to do anything less than their best. It’s the story of students who sat where you sit 250 years ago, and went on to wage a revolution and found this nation.”

That’s just isn’t true. Only a relatively small percentage of the Colonists pressed for Independence in 1776 and a central government thirteen years later. And no one’s kids were forced to go to school by the state as they are now. It’s an important piece because it illustrates how much in balance freedom is with the truth, and how important it is to lead others to the truth if they are to remain free. Is this what’s happening in our public schools these days?

About one-third into the talk Obama says, “What you make of your education will decide nothing less than the future of this country. What you’re learning in school today will determine whether we as a nation can meet our greatest challenges in the future.”

That’s a heavy load to put on K-12 kids considering the fact that over 40 percent of those “graduating” from public high school lack grade profficiency in math and composition and many who get into college must take remedial writing and math classes just to stay in school. On the basis of those results, kids have been granted diplomas who quite possibly cannot work out in their mind — and certainly not on paper — what their or the nation’s greatest challenges might or should be. Might it be contended that they don’t know how to think? to reason?

“I’ve talked a lot about your government’s responsibility for setting high standards, supporting teachers and principals, and turning around schools that aren’t working where students aren’t getting the opportunities they deserve,” Mr. Obama says. “But at the end of the day, we can have the most dedicated teachers, the most supportive parents, and the best schools in the world – and none of it will matter unless all of you fulfill your responsibilities. Unless you show up to those schools; pay attention to those teachers; listen to your parents, grandparents and other adults; and put in the hard work it takes to succeed.”

“And that’s what I want to focus on today,” he continues, “the responsibility each of you has for your education. I want to start with the responsibility you have to yourself.”

In an article on the kerfuffle “the speech” was causing The Wall Street Journal reported that “Secretary of Education Arne Duncan acknowledged on CBS’s “Face the Nation” Sunday that some of the materials provided to local school officials were poorly worded and may have lead to some confusion about the speech’s goals.” Not the kind of admission you want to make as the director of a federal bureaucracy already at least partially responsible for launching a generation of functional illiterates into remedial programs.

In numerous articles and books, Fr. James V. Schall has written on the life of the mind. Those of the Judeo-Christian tradition are guided by rules. “Do not lie” requires knowledge of The Truth and for one seriously considering piety begins a life long inquiry of The Truth.

Contrast Mr. Obama’s responsiblity you have to yourself with Fr. Schall’s response to a question in an August 2005 interview “…by reading or teaching, we are at best brought to the banks of the river of intellect as it flows on. When we jump in, we sink or swim by ourselves. But we already have a mind that, as mind, is ours, not of our own making. This mind is not given to us to think whatever we wish, but to think whatever is true. If what we wish is not true, it is no virtue to stick to our wishes. Tests of truth exist. We should know them.”

Obama says, “But the truth is, being successful is hard. You won’t love every subject you study. You won’t click with every teacher.”

And so we return to that “me” culture, the essence of which is what is good for me, what is it that I want. And this is so totally different from what parents who kept their children away on Tuesday want and in the pursuit of which we should hope that God will grant His blessings.

Chester E. Finn Jr. served with William J. Bennett [The Book of Virtues et al] in The Department of Education under President Reagan from 1985 to 1988 — that point in Reagan’s presidency when the talk of shutting down the Department had been abandoned.

Bennett has often quipped about his tenure while SecEd as one where he stood at the ship’s wheel turning it from starboard to port all the while not realizing that the cables connecting the wheel with the rudder had been removed. It’s a good way to explain how massive amounts of money get spent in the bureaucrat’s effort both at State and Federal levels to educate kids with a consistent result that kids emerge from public schools in great numbers functionally illiterate.

And we’re talking here about a lot of money. K-12 public education spending in the U.S. with the Obama stimulus added in will total $667 Billion this year or $13,340.00 per public school enrolled child.

Those nearly two million kids who are home schooled and win spelling bee championships are likely wincing at that number since their parents get back virtually nothing of what they pay to the tax man.

Lately we’ve used test scores to validate and measure the public school failure, and those who still head large bureaucracies have tried to tweak their systems with new plans. Bush tried “no child left behind” and Obama’s Chicago friend Arne Duncan is touting “Race to the Top.”

Just off vacation where one hopes to get refreshed, Chester Finn from his pinnacles at Hoover Institute and Fordham Foundation has published a piece at National Review Online that has me confused. He’s a friend on a lot of issues but after reading “A Constitutional Moment for American Education” I’m thinking that Checker, a welcomed nickname, has been to one too many teacher’s conferences.

First let me explain that I’m seeing almost everything government does these days through the dark glass of Obama’s attempted seizure of American social and industrial institutions. He’s trying to nationalize us. So yesterday when I was informed shortly after reading Finn’s piece at NRO that a part of the Obama Health Industry takeover included S224 the “Education Begins at Home” scheme, my heart skipped a beat. Here’s why.

The Obama “health” plan provides “Grants to States for Quality Home Visitation Programs for Families with Young Children and Families Expecting Children” [p. 840] and provides for “coordination and collaboration with other home visitation programs and other child and family services, health services, income supports and other related assistance.” Do you see the dots I’m connecting? In California such a home visitation service already exists, financed by Rob Reiner’s [Meatball] cigarette tax money. It’s cradle to grave control.

Finn’s essay is meant as a reflection of what spurred on the Founding Fathers from the days of The Articles of Confederation to passage of The Constitution — a period he describes as “political invention combined with …. nurturing” which he overlays on the conundrum American education finds itself in today. So far okay, right?

But here it gets interesting because Finn sees traditional K-12 “local control” as obsolete and frail, ill suited to urban mobility, mired in parochial assessments. At the same time he sees a President’s education mottos and marketing schemes doomed to fail because they inevitably are only trying to “make the old system work better” — and I agree with that part.

Yet Finn wants us to take characteristics that drove our Founders toward Constitution which he lists as Imagination, Statesmanship, Courage and Adaptation and apply them to a scheme of National Standards and Measures and the replacement of school “districts” with an array of “virtual or national operators.”

And he inserts into the “adaptation” paragraph a nod to Judicial power that in my opinion is one of our major problems — a concession to opinions from appointees rather than a reliance on representatives for whom we vote. Almost all proposed laws these days are passed by Congress and legislatures with vague directives from those rocket scientists to “let the courts sort it out.” Our law making is a mess and one of the reasons that few of the Congress who voted last spring on a law to penalize executives who were to receive bonus money during the bailout debacle were bothered that The Constitution forbid “ex post facto” laws. These people don’t read the bills they vote on; they don’t read The Constitution. They can’t pass a civic literacy test.

So, where goes Federalism in Finn’s suggestions? Is Checker so blind as to not see that the failures of the education system in America are the failures of the public, state run education systems?

Those Founders who managed to put our country together included John Adams who had been taught at home and with neighbor children under the guidance of divinity graduates until he went off to Harvard and sat for the bar. Most in the country were taught at home and in urban areas at parochial schools up until that time when modernity grabbed hold of our lives — until that time when The Enlightenment took hold of education and under the guidance of progressive liberals made it “public.”

In his book Surprised by Hope, N.T. Wright reminds us that politicians generally gain their inspiration from the false notion that they can lead us to Utopia with promises of scientific advance and wider education. But Wright reminds us that “the utopian dream is in fact a parody of the Christian vision.” We will not be made perfect by hard work and study; but only with God’s grace.

Professor James Tooley‘s new book The Beautiful Tree is reviewed at NRO by Dan Lips. It’s a story of an emerging new kind of school in places like India and Africa and the developing world where desperately poor citizens recognize the value of an education and on their own have created a private market for it separate of the state. And it’s working.

Just another instance where elites in The United States of America have something to learn from the natives.

In a Wall Street Journal article titled “The Great Philanthropy Takeover” Arkansas based writer David Sanders reports on a recent conference of the nationwide Council of Foundations in his home state. Sanders’ article aligns with Michael Miller’s blog of July 30 “Healthcare – Don’t Forget The Morality Of It” and deserves your attention because of the author’s conclusion that the Obama administration “is beginning to nationalize another sector of the American economy.”

How could that happen? Well it would happen because many of those folks who head up non-profit groups that rely on OPM — other people’s money — have a tough time identifying and convincing donors to give them some. Obama is offering an alternative: Bundled packages of tax payer’s money for “shovel ready” community help projects. If you’re a struggling non-profit with an iffy mission, it’s the greatest grant available.

And Obama knows about grants because when he was a community organizer in Chicago he and his associates, including William Ayres, were able to get over $120 million including matching funds from the Annenberg Foundation to spread around to their constituents. Eventually the Annenberg people cut off their funds because no good could be attributed to the use of all the money they’d supplied, but you get the picture.

Notwithstanding the deceitfulness of that Ayres-Obama Chicago enterprise, we generally should be wary of Greeks bearing gifts.

At the NCEA convention earlier this year I introduced and listened to a former lobbyist give advice to a room full of Catholic educators on how to get a piece of the stimulus money Obama had just announced would be available for schools. Just like Larry Arnn at Hillsdale College in Michigan and the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, I’m distrustful of the influence government has on curriculum and the mission of our schools and worry about the federal government’s intrusion into any enterprise. But at the NCEA event, the room was all ears to the application tricks being offered them.

That’s also what happened at the Foundation meeting in Arkansas, where as Sanders writes:

Carlos Monje, policy director of the White House’s Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation, briefed the conference on how President Obama, who came up through the ranks of community organizing, wants to “change the ethic of service” for the country. Key to the administration achieving its desired results? Rewarding model nonprofits with federal dollars—seed capital—from the new $50 million “Social Innovation Fund.”

That phrase “ethic of service” calls to mind many things that hang on the tenets of faith to which Christians pay mind. But as we are consistently reminded by the scholars at Acton Institute, our charity is best left to the individual.

As Acton’s core principles state: “The government’s primary responsibility is to promote the common good, that is, to maintain the rule of law, and to preserve basic duties and rights. The government’s role is not to usurp free actions, but to minimize those conflicts that may arise when the free actions of persons and social institutions result in competing interests.” You might ask in this context who would declare a non-profit a proper “model” for funding or determine appropriate “social innovation?” If you said Mr. Monje you’re probably right.

Making the case to individuals for your “good deed” request is not an easy task, but it’s the only way we should be promoting the kind of Charity explicit in the ministry of Jesus Christ.

As I tell my friends in education, “Watch out for the serpent in your tent. Watch out for that Trojan Horse.”